If someone recommends an account to follow and it looks blank to you, it probably isn't actually blank! It probably just looks that way when you view it from your server.
If you follow the account, future posts will start showing up on your server.
It is confusing, but there are really good reasons why it happens. You can read more about it (including how to check what a profile really looks like, and how to prevent your own profile looking blank) here:
@feditips Is there a reason not to show all the account’s original posts when you view it on a server that doesn’t store any of them? The server could proxy the posts from their source server, or even just instruct the client browser to go grab and display them.
This feels important to me, as discovery is one of the big challenges for new mastodon users, and this effect is a pretty big speed bump on that road
I'm not sure, I'm not a developer, but there has been a lot of technical discussion of what to do on the backfilling thread at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34
@feditips Thanks for the link, that’s pretty interesting, though slightly different from what I was suggesting. Where that deals with how to copy old posts onto a server after someone subscribes, I’m thinking about how to show old posts to someone who is not subscribed without copying them to the server.
I will dig around the issues and see if my suggestion is in there, and if not, I’ll add it! The beauty of open source! :)
Ah okay! If all you want to do is *show* the old posts, you can open the original page, and there's a link on blank profiles to do this which prompts people to click on it.
But if people can see old posts they may want to interact with them, and wonder why they can't, so that ends up confusing too.
Ideal would be some way to get at least some unpinned posts automatically backfilled the way pinned posts already are.
@feditips Good point, if posts from another server are ephemerally presented to you, they would not be available for interaction. So the whole thing could lead to more confusion unless you could copy an unpinned post from an unfollowed user to your server upon interacting with it. And that sounds like a much bigger lift. I appreciate you giving me that context.
By the way, an alternative approach if you just want non-interactive feeds is to subscribe to accounts via RSS. Any Mastodon account has an RSS feed which is its normal account profile URL with .rss added to the end.
PeerTube has an RSS subscription option if you click the arrow on an account's "subscribe" button.
Pixelfed supports newsfeeds (but I think they use atom?).
GoToSocial (I think?) includes RSS support but each user has to manually opt in to activate their feed.